Mockingbird Family pilot project going well in Cape Breton, foster parent says

A pilot project for a new approach to foster care is underway in Cape Breton and Halifax with the aim of rolling it out across the province in 2024.

The trial of the Mockingbird Family model launched in December in Nova Scotia. It connects family groups of local foster homes to create a large extended family.

The program has been implemented in the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan and other countries. 

Evelyn MacInnis has been a foster parent for 30 years. She sits on the board of the Federation of Foster Families of Nova Scotia.

Her home is the "hub"' for the first Cape Breton Mockingbird Family.

MacInnis spoke to CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia host Portia Clark about some of the challenges and benefits of the trial run.

 Their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and length. 

Your home is a hub for the first Mockingbird family in Cape Breton. Describe what that means in a practical sense?

There's some eight homes involved in the constellation around the hub. As a hub home, our responsibility is to bring the other eight homes together once a month — all the foster kids, biological children, the foster parents — and it allows the children to get to know other foster parents.

That kind of fans out into being able to be familiar with other families in the same circumstances.

It's a good thing for the kids because they can have sleepovers. The children come into care that are siblings, if they all can't be placed in the same home, they can be placed within the constellation.

That way they're able to be in contact with their siblings more often than if they're placed all across the province or the Cape Breton area.

Have you seen this be a benefit to the foster parents who are part of this in the sense that they ... can ask practical questions about how things are going for them or get advice?

It's been very good.

There are some foster parents that aren't as comfortable going out and asking for advice or looking for information. So they're able to call and if I don't know the answers, I'm sure within the group that we can find those answers.

Does it help these foster parents with, not just the challenges, but the feeling of isolation?

It'll do wonders for the kids and for the foster parents. You hear over the years that people feel isolated and because they have kids in care they don't know how they're going to react to situations.You kind of have to keep it close until you figure out what works and what doesn't work.

Being in the constellation, if something came up you could ... drop the kids off to go get the groceries. There's two women in the constellation that do that.

Because of the confidentiality thing, you can't really reach out to somebody in your community that doesn't know the child or the family.

It breaks down some of the possible stigma around being foster kids. Do they also understand the umbrella, confidentiality? They go into the community, they're at school together. How does that work?

It's hard for the foster kids because as soon as they get on the bus at the end of our driveway, people know they're foster kids.

A lot of the kids don't like to make it known that they're foster kids.

It's a hard balance for the kids to be put out there and question and not realize that other kids are going through the same things they're going through.

The whole concept of Mockingbird is the innocence. My husband always tries to make the kids realize when they come that for whatever reason they're in care. It's not their fault, they're innocent in all this.

So it's really good to have this program.

Do you think it'll make a difference for them when they age out of care, they might keep up some of these connections?

Definitely.

I have one girl out in Red Deer, Alberta. She's still in touch with one of the first foster children we had 30 years ago and now they get together.

This is going to just escalate the connections.

I know it's just been going since December, but any advice or feedback on changes?

In the beginning, the powers that be wanted to start more than one hub home in the area and Mockingbird, the program itself, advised against it because there's things that have to be straightened out and things that have to be realized through the program and what's good and what's bad about it.

It would have been chaos, I think, if more than one or two homes had been rolled out in the beginning. Because you have to remember that the workers are new to this, we're new to it, the kids are new to it and the community is new to it.

Until we figure out and get some of the bumps out of the road, I think it was a good idea to just hold off until we see what's going on with it and it's working well.

Have there been any bumps?

I think that people are a little bit wary of change. We all are.

I just hope that everybody will give it a chance. It's here now and it's something that we've been wanting and looking for and hoping for since 20 years.

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